Bubble Up is a lemon-lime soda brand created in 1919 by Sweet Valley Products Co. of Sandusky, Ohio — a full decade before 7UP hit store shelves. Once a national player that sold 20 million cases in its best year, it is now a hard-to-find specialty item in the United States, owned by one company for North America and another for the rest of the world.
Bubble Up's Pioneering Origins
Here's a twist most fans don't expect: Bubble Up didn't start as lemon-lime at all. According to the brand's history as summarized on Wikipedia, the name was first used in 1919 by Sweet Valley Products Co. of Sandusky, Ohio, and at that time it was advertised as a grape juice, not a citrus soda.
Sweet Valley filed a trademark for the name Bubble-Up on August 13, 1919, with registration following on April 12, 1921. Then the name went quiet — Wikipedia's history notes it was virtually unused from 1922 to 1937. In 1937, LeRoy O. Schneeburger of St. Louis, then president of the Whistle-Vess Beverage Co., bought the U.S. registration, registered the mark in his own name in 1938, and introduced Bubble-Up as a lemon-lime drink. From that point on, the mark was never used for grape juice again.
So the lemon-lime icon we know today is really a 1937 reinvention of a 1919 name. The brand's own current owner, Hedinger Brands, LLC, which presents the brand on its Dad's Root Beer site, dates the brand simply to its 1919 creation.
Early Market Dominance and the Rise of a Rival: Bubble Up vs. 7UP
Bubble Up had a head start. As Click Americana's archival reporting recounts, drawing on a 1973 Chicago Tribune column by George Lazarus, Bubble Up predates 7UP — the former registered in the early 1920s, the latter later in that decade. Fox News likewise notes that Bubble Up debuted in 1919, a decade before 7UP.
But a head start isn't a finish line. Despite its early entry, Bubble Up never got ahead of 7UP, nor could it compete with later entrants like Sprite and Teem. By 1973, per Lazarus's reporting, Seven-Up Co. had practically doubled lemon-lime's share of the soft drink business to 16 percent over two decades — a share that was itself a distant runner-up to the 63 percent enjoyed by colas.
Bubble Up's own numbers tell the story of a brand with real peaks and real stumbles. Its top year was 1961, when 20 million cases were sold nationally. After that came what Lazarus described as "spotty" performance — attributed to "lack of capital, poor management, etc., which ultimately led into bankruptcy."
